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Book burning, biblioclasm or libricide is the practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material and media. In modern times, other forms of media, such as phonograph records, video tapes, and CDs have also been ceremoniously burned, torched, or shredded. The practice, usually carried out in public, is generally motivated by moral, religious, or political objections to the material.
Some particular cases of book burning are long and traumatically remembered - because the books destroyed were irreplaceable and their loss constituted a severe damage to cultural heritage, and/or because this instance of book burning has become emblematic of a harsh and oppressive regime. Such were the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the obliteration of the Library of Baghdad, the burning of books and burying of scholars under China's Qin Dynasty, the destruction of Aztec codices by Itzcoatl, and the Nazi book burnings of Jewish literature.
Although one motivation for book burning may be censorship, it is in most cases an act of displaying severe displeasure, hatred, or contempt for the book's contents or author, or to attract attention for the outrage perceived by those who highly appreciate the book and its content. For example, the burning of Beatles records after a remark by John Lennon concerning Jesus Christ, the destruction of the Sarajevo National Library, and the 2010 Qur'an-burning controversy.
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From China's 3rd century BC Qin Dynasty to the present day, the burning of books has a long history as a tool wielded by authorities both secular and religious, in efforts to suppress dissenting or heretical views that are perceived as posing a threat to the prevailing order.
According to scholar Elaine Pagels, "In AD 367, Athanasius, the zealous bishop of Alexandria… issued an Easter letter in which he demanded that Egyptian monks destroy all such unacceptable writings, except for those he specifically listed as 'acceptable' even 'canonical' — a list that constitutes the present 'New Testament'". Although Pagels cites Athanasius's Paschal letter (letter 39) for 367 AD, there is no order for monks to destroy heretical works contained in that letter.[1] Thus, heretical texts do not turn up as palimpsests, washed clean and overwritten, as pagan ones do; many early Christian texts have been as thoroughly "lost" as if they had been publicly burnt.
According to the Chronicle of Fredegar, Recared, King of the Wisigoths (reigned 586–601) and first Catholic king of Spain, following his conversion to Catholicism in 587, ordered that all Arian books should be collected and burned; and all the books of Arian theology were reduced to ashes, with the house in which they had been purposely collected.[2][3]
Nalanda, an ancient center of higher learning in Bihar, India was sacked by Turkic Muslim invaders under Bakhtiyar Khalji in 1193. The great library of Nalanda University was so vast that it is reported to have burned for three months after the invaders set fire to it, sacked and destroyed the monasteries, and drove the monks from the site.
In his 1821 play, Almansor, the German writer Heinrich Heine— referring to the burning of the Muslim holy book, the Qur'an, during the Spanish Inquisition — wrote, "Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings." ("Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.") Over a century later, Heine's own books were among the thousands of volumes that were torched by the Nazis in Berlin's Opernplatz.
In Azerbaijan, when a modified Latin alphabet was adopted, books published in Arabic script were burned, especially in the late 1920s and 1930s.[4] The texts were not limited to the Quran; medical and historical manuscripts were also destroyed.[5]
Anthony Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873, inscribed book burning on its seal, as a worthy goal to be achieved (see illustration at right). Comstock's total accomplishment in a long and influential career is estimated to have been the destruction of some 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates for printing such 'objectionable' books, and nearly 4,000,000 pictures. All of this material was defined as "lewd" by Comstock's very broad definition of the term — which he and his associates successfully lobbied the United States Congress to incorporate in the Comstock Law.
In the 1950s several books by William Reich were ordered to be burned in the U.S. under judicial orders.[6]
The Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451 is about a fictional future society that has institutionalized book burning. In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the euphemistically-called "memory hole" is used to burn any book or written text which is inconvenient to the regime, and there is mention of "the total destruction of all books published before 1960".
The advent of the digital age has resulted in an immense collection of written work being catalogued exclusively or primarily in digital form. The intentional deletion or removal of these works has been often referred to as a new form of book burning.
Some supporters have celebrated book burning cases in art and other media. Such is the bas-relief by Giovanni Battista Maini of The Burning of Heretical Books over a side door on the façade of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, which depicts the burning of 'heretical' books as a triumph of righteousness.[7]
In the Sikh religion, any copies of the Guru Granth Sahib which are too badly damaged to be used, and any printer's waste which has any of its text on (see Guru Granth Sahib#Printing), are cremated with a similar ceremony as cremating a deceased man. Such burning is called Agan Bhet. [8] [9] [10] [11]
In 1666, as the Great Fire of London advanced, many booksellers who had stores in London put their books in Old St Paul's Cathedral's stone-lined crypt for safety. But as the cathedral burned falling heavy masonry broke through into the crypt and let the fire in and all the books burned. A contemporary description said that was the biggest burning of books since the burning of the Alexandria Library.
In 1697 the Royal Tre Kronor castle in Stockholm, Sweden burned down, causing the destruction of most of Sweden's national library and royal archives[12] and making the country's early history unusually difficult to document. Investigation determined that the fire was caused by the gross negligence of two officials, but no deliberate arson. The two were sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted.
On 23 October 1731, a fire in Ashburnham House destroyed or damaged many books in the Cotton library: see Cotton library#The Ashburnham House fire.
The entire library of the notable book collector Aleksei Musin-Pushkin was among numerous buildings consumed in the Great Moscow Fire when Napoleon's Grand Army entered Moscow. Among the books lost was the original (and only) manuscript copy of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", a masterpiece of Russian medieval literature, whose text was fortunately transcribed and published a few years earlier. It is still debated whether or not the fire was set deliberately and if so by whom; in any case, the books were clearly not the intended target.
During the London Blitz in the Second World War, the British Museum was bombed on 23 September 1940 and a small bomb fell on the Gallery where the book collection was stored. It was not, in this case, a specific German intention to burn books. However, 124 volumes were completely destroyed, a further 304 were damaged beyond repair, and many others required substantial restoration.
When Virgil died, he left instructions that his manuscript of the Aeneid was to be burnt, as it was a draft version with uncorrected faults and not a final version for release; however, this instruction was ignored.
Before his death, Franz Kafka wrote to his friend and literary executor Max Brod: "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread."[14] Brod overrode Kafka's wishes, believing that Kafka had given these directions to him specifically, because Kafka knew he would not honour them — Brod had told him as much. Had Brod carried out Kafka's instructions, virtually the whole of Kafka's work - except for a few short stories published in his lifetime - would have been lost forever. Most critics, at the time and up to the present, justify Brod's decision.
A similar case concerns the noted American poet Emily Dickinson, who died in 1890 and left to her sister Lavinia the instruction of burning all her papers. Lavinia Dickinson did burn almost all of her sister's correspondences, but interpreted the will as not including the forty notebooks and loose sheets, all filled with almost 1800 poems; these Lavinia saved and began to publish the poems that year. Had Lavinia Dickinson been more strict in carrying out her sister's will, all but a small handful of Emily Dickinson's poetic work would have been lost[15][16]
At the beginning of the Battle of Monte Cassino in the Second World War, two German officers - the Viennese-born Lt.Col. Julius Schlegel (a Roman Catholic), and Captain Maximilian Becker (a Protestant) - had the foresight to transfer the Monte Cassino archives to the Vatican. Otherwise the archives - containing a vast number of documents relating to the 1500-years' history of the Abbey as well as some 1400 irreplaceable manuscript codices, chiefly patristic and historical - would have been destroyed in the Allied air bombing which almost completely destroyed the Abbey shortly afterwards. Also saved by the two officers' prompt action were the collections of the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome which had been sent to the Abbey for safety in December 1942.